by an improving U.S. economy, begins to pick up later in the year, says Mauro Ratto, head of emerging markets at Pioneer Investments, a fund manager.

The shifts are reflected in the financial markets. Gains in the U.S. stock market over the last month months are smaller than those in emerging markets.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index has climbed 12 percent since closing at its year low on Feb. 3. The MSCI India, a broad index of Indian stocks, has surged 30 percent over the same period. Turkish stocks have jumped 44 percent and Brazilian stocks are up 26 percent.

Emerging markets have benefited from the Fed's easy-money policies. Those policies, with their low interest rates, have prompted investors to hunt for higher rates of return overseas.

Last year, however, when the Fed started to outline its plan for reducing stimulus and raising rates, investors began pulling their money out of emerging markets. That caused their currencies, as well as their stock and bond markets, to plummet.

The MSCI Emerging Markets index, which measures 800 securities across 21 markets, fell almost 10 percent from the start of May to the end of June, and ended the year down almost 5 percent. The Turkish lira dropped almost 11 percent in five months from the start of September to the end of January 2014.

This year, growth in the U.S. has disappointed. Treasury yields have fallen instead of rising as most analysts predicted. As a result, emerging economies with higher growth are more attractive. Low interest rates also make it more lucrative for investors to borrow in the U.S. and invest in overseas economies that offer higher returns.

''Clearly, the most important driver year-to-date has been the global financial conditions,'' says Gerardo Rodriguez, a senior investment strategist for BlackRock's emerging markets group.

The Brazilian stock market may also get a boost if its team, the favorite to win the World Cup, lifts the trophy at the end of the tournament. Analysts at Goldman Sachs calculate that, on average, a victorious country's stock market outperforms the global market by 3.5 percent in the first month after the win.

Others are more skeptical of this year's gains in emerging stock markets.

Andres Garcia-Amaya, a global market strategist for J.P. Morgan Funds, says the comeback in emerging markets is driven by market-specific factors, not improvements in the outlook for economies, and is unlikely to last long. The markets are bouncing back because